Over my days off, I’ve enjoyed a little time back in Orange County, where I’ve been reading about your holiday traditions.

Mona Tehle wrote that her family always makes time for a couple hours of Lotería.

“I learned to play as a child from my Mexican grandmother and South Texas cousins, and my sons learned from my mother and their cousins,” she said. “Even though we are all adults now, we continue this tradition that I hope my kids will eventually pass on to their offspring.”

Tom Levy, for instance, leaves Oakland with his spouse and son, now 14, during Christmas week to go cross-country skiing in Bear Valley.

“Since I’m Jewish and we celebrate Hanukkah and downplay the Christmas stuff, we really don’t mind not being at home during all that hoopla,” he wrote.

Fred Hoffman told me that on Jan. 1, “crowds of cold (but somewhat fit) bicyclists make the big climb to the summit of Mount Diablo,” in the Bay Area.

But far and away, the bulk of the traditions I heard about involved food. A Christmas breakfast casserole — with Marie Callender’s cornbread mix and always Jimmy Dean sausage — for Barbara Cohen’s family. Oysters Rockefeller with champagne are an “actually healthy and decadent” way for Jan Newman to ring in the new year.

And, of course, lots of people wrote in to say that they eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day.

It’s a tradition that started in the South, with deep roots in African-American culture. Then, in true Californian fashion, it seems to have made it out West by tracing a variety of migration paths.

Jim Johnson said he first remembered eating black-eyed pea martinis in Texas. He’s lived in California for 35 years. Denise Bachman said that her black-eyed pea tradition came with her family from New Orleans.

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Kevin Cooper, shown in 1983, is on death row for his 1985 conviction in the killings of Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their daughter and a neighbor’s son in Chino Hills, Calif.CreditAssociated Press

• Jerry Brown granted Christmas Eve clemencies, including 143 pardons and 131 commutations. Among those were a Cambodian immigrant who will avoid deportation as a result of the pardon and the editor in chief of the San Quentin News, who got a commuted sentence. Brown also ordered DNA testing in a death row case. [The New York Times]

• Failures by Congress to agree on new immigration legislation or viable guest worker programs to meet the demands of the economy mean that the counterfeit identification industry is thriving in enclaves like L.A.’s MacArthur Park, but also, increasingly, online. [The New York Times]

• Square will keep its headquarters in San Francisco. But its deal to move up to 2,000 employees into Uptown Station across the Bay will still make it the biggest tech company in Oakland. [The San Francisco Chronicle]

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Signs have gone up naming a section of a Los Angeles-area freeway as the President Barack H. Obama Highway, seen from Pasadena.CreditJohn Antczak/Associated Press

• Signs marking a stretch of the 134 freeway “President Barack H. Obama Highway” are now up from Glendale through Eagle Rock, where the former president went to college for a couple of years at Occidental. [CBS News]

• Robert Garcia was already Long Beach’s first Latino and openly gay mayor. On Saturday, he also became the city’s first mayor to be married while in office, when he tied the knot with his longtime partner in an exuberant ceremony. [The Long Beach Press-Telegram]

• A pair of twins in Patterson gave birth to their daughters half an hour apart. “I feel like it’s a way to tell us to keep celebrating everything together,” one of the sisters said. [The San Luis Obispo Tribune]

• Hate it when the holidays end? Here’s why the Philippines, Asia’s only Catholic-majority country, boasts the longest yuletide season in the world. [NPR]

• Lillian Li, an author whose mother worked in a Chinese restaurant, writes about how they first became a Christmas destination for Jews because they were all that was open. Today, there’s nothing more American than going out for Chinese food on the holiday. [The New York Times]

• Well, we now know that the L.A.P.D. and N.Y.P.D. agree that “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie. [The Associated Press]

And Finally …

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Santa, a.k.a. Ben Frable, talks about marine life as part of the Birch Aquarium’s “Seas ‘n’ Greetings” dive show.CreditJohn Gastaldo for the Birch Aquarium

Christmas may be over, but you can still get a festive tour of the deep for a couple more days at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Birch Aquarium in San Diego.

Above, you can see Ben Frable, who manages its marine vertebrates collection, showing off sea creatures like leopard sharks, garibaldi fish, moray eels and the aquarium’s giant black sea bass. While dressed as Santa.

The costume is part of the “Seas ‘n’ Greetings” event, which, starting tomorrow will just involve scuba-diving elves — Santa is tired, an aquarium spokeswoman wrote in an email.

And if you’re not in San Diego, the aquarium has a Kelp Cam, which makes for pretty soothing viewing with or without a guide.

California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com.

California Today is written by Jill Cowan and edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.